The Reviews for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) Let the flames begin. Join OVR as we kick off our 56th anniversary! A summer filled with fun & life lasting memories begins! Hope to see you at the Jersey Shore in Ocean View Resort Campground! The Surface, Moral, Allegorical, and Sublime Meanings. For an updated discussion of the series in light of the finale, including the alchemical, allegorical, and anagogical meanings, please head over here. If you have read The Hunger Games and Catching Fireor you’re interested in a discussion of how to use traditional tools of literary analysis to understand contemporary fiction, then you are in the right place. Find yourself a beverage to your liking and pull up a chair. Last Sunday, in a post called . Donner- Undersee was the mastermind- puppeteer behind the Mockingjay story being written within the Capitol’s Hunger Games. Accidental Murder occurs when a situation that wasn't intended to be lethal ends with the death of someone anyway. Occasionally, this happens because a fight just goes too far (Bob and Alice start fighting, and the fight gets.Many readers have embraced the idea, at least as many have objected to the theory, and I have spent most of the past week answering questions about and objections to it (see here and here and here and here). Then let’s get started. Dante and The Hunger Games. The first premise of my argument about the layered meaning of The Hunger Games Trilogy is that Suzanne Collins is a brilliant writer whose novels are simultaneously inspired and deliberately crafted. Many of the objections to the Pearl Plot theory (hereafter just . Much of the denial, sadly, is class bias and misogyny, but I think most of it is really just a misunderstanding of why we read. We are taught that reading is an entertainment or diversion very much like any other type of . It is a tragic and not a trivial game. Writers are delivering much more than diversion. Saul Bellow once explained to newspaper reporters the difference between their written work and his was that he “wrote for eternity.” Think that’s pompous? How many newspapers do you keep on a shelf in your home or share with friends? Read to your children? Writers are after the big game of life’s meaning and we come to their work expecting them to deliver. Reading has spiritual import and consequences. I am convinced a good part of the skepticism about popular books having depth, beyond misunderstanding what reading is for, is doubt about the intelligence and craft of the series’ author. When writing about the Austen elements in Harry Potter and the Shakespeare echoes in Twilight, I was laboring against the pigeon- holed perception many readers have that non- academic writers like Ms. Meyer, who though well educated do not have advanced degrees in English or teach writing, cannot be familiar with or be using the tools from the Greats’ toolbox. Discussing the meaning and artistry of The Hunger Games, though, shouldn’t require clearing this particular hurdle. Suzanne Collins has a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in dramatic writing from New York University (NYU). Let’s be clear about what that means, if only because most Americans don’t get what an MFA is. If you’re like me, you think of a “Masters Degree” as a stepping stone to real postgraduate study, namely, Ph. D or doctoral studies. An MFA is a Masters but it is the end of the road in the study of the fine arts with practical applications. MFA programs have generally required a bachelor’s degree prior to admission, but many have not required that the undergraduate major be the same as the MFA field of study. The most important admissions requirement has often been a sample portfolio or a performance audition. The MFA differs from the Master of Arts in that the MFA, while an academic program, centers around practice in the particular field, whereas programs leading to the MA are usually centered on the scholarly, academic, or critical study of the field. The MFA is seen as a terminal degree, meaning that it is considered to be the highest degree in its field. An MFA differs from a Masters, then, in being “hands- on” study, in being as far as you can go, and, most important, in its being truly Masters work, in the sense of an apprentice studying with a Master. To receive the MFA in creative writing at NYU today means a lot of workshops in Greenwich Village: Requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree include the completion of 3. Four graduate creative writing workshops taken in four separate semesters (1. One to four craft courses (The Craft of Poetry or The Craft of Fiction), taught by members of the CWP faculty. Craft courses may be repeated provided they are taught by different instructors (4 to 1. Any remaining courses chosen from any department with the permission of that department and of the director of the CWP. A creative thesis in poetry or fiction, consisting of a substantial piece of writing—a novella, a collection of short stories, or a group of poems—to be submitted in the student’s final semester. The project requires the approval of the student’s faculty thesis adviser and of the director of the CWP. I do not know how this MFa in creative writing differs — or if it differs — from the MFA in dramatic writing when Ms. Collins was at NYU but I imagine the core requirements for Master seminars in Craft of Fiction were the same. What is that required course that students are expected to repeat with different instructors about? The website page with the MFA seminar faculty and schedules for the class doesn’t spell out course requirements, but with teachers like E. Doctorow, David Lipsky, and Edward Hirsch, we know the conversations in these classrooms are not just about how to package a book or screenplay proposal for your literary agent. But we all know, too, that you can skate through any degree program, alas, and that advanced degrees or the lack of one tell us very little about what an author knows or what talents they bring to the table. As with the Hogwarts and Forks Sagas, the test is in the text. Does the Panem Trilogy have the literary guts and substance reflecting that Ms. Collins got anything out of her advanced studies in dramatic writing? I think even the most superficial look at her books says that it does. And by “superficial,” I mean right at the surface: the number of books and chapters. If you haven’t noticed, the first two of the three book set are each twenty seven chapters long and in three parts of nine chapters each. So what? In itself, of course, this clever use of threes — a trilogy of books, each having three sections, each section having 3- squared chapters, for 3- cubed chapters in each book, and 3- to- the- fourth chapters in the series — could be meaningless or just an affectation. Even if so, it is also, nonetheless, a marker or red flag for Dante’s influence. His Divine Comedy is in three books or canticas of 3. When a writer makes a point of stacking threes in her story structure, the serious reader asks herself, “Is she telling me to think Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso?”I think she is. I’ll explain that in a bit but I couldn’t resist the lede in to traditional literary criticism that this thin Dante link provides. Because to lay out why I think the text is substantive enough to stand up to a reading at depth, I need to look at Hunger Games as I would a “Great Book,’ as in, say, Hamlet or War and Peace. Dante, fortunately, left instructions in his letter to Can Grande about how readers should read his poems: in the four senses, namely, the literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical levels of meaning. For me be able to present what I am going to say, you must know that the sense of this work is not simple, rather it may be called polysemantic, that is, of many senses; the first sense is that which comes from the letter, the second is that of that which is signified by the letter. And the first is called the literal, the second allegorical or moral or anagogical. Which method of treatment, that it may be clearer, can be considered through these words: “When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people, Judea was made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion” (Douay- Rheims, Ps. If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leave taking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical. Now, allegory comes from Greek alleon, which in Latin means other or different. I have explained at length in my last three books — that would be Deathly Hallows Lectures, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf, and Spotlight— why these four senses are not arbitrary perspectives but straight reflections of the four ways human beings know anything (for the free short course in iconological criticism, read this). Before I roll out version 2. Collins is writing deliberatively and at depth and that her works deserve a serious reading — even outlandish speculation based on the themes and meaning of the books we have in hand at present. Time allowing, I’ll expand it into a proper book or booklet with the longer explanations this introduction cannot have if I’m to get back to the Pearl Plot this month! This is just because all of the other meanings have to come through the surface. Whether they are understood consciously or experienced unconsciously, the several allegorical layers can only be had via what the viewer sees in the painting or sculpture or in the narrative line the reader reads. For writers, the surface story has to do several things right up front. However fantastic the setting or unusual the characters and plot, the tale has to be sufficiently credible that the reader suspends disbelief and enters into the story in an act of poetic faith. It helps a lot if the lead character or narrator is someone- in- a- situation with whom the reader is fascinated, sympathetic, or, best of all, that s/he is someone both fascinating and sympathy- inducing.
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